s bare feet,
showing me his hogs and horses. Notwithstanding his town-visitor and the
fact that it was Sunday, he came to dinner in a dirty, sweaty,
collarless shirt, and I, sitting at his oil-cloth covered table, slipped
back, deeper, ever deeper among the stern realities of the life from
which I had emerged. I recalled that while my father had never allowed
his sons or the hired men to come to the table unwashed or uncombed, we
usually ate while clothed in our sweaty garments, glad to get food into
our mouths in any decent fashion, while the smell of the horse and the
cow mingled with the savor of the soup. There is no escape even on a
modern "model farm" from the odor of the barn.

Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and
half-hidden despair. Agnes had married and moved away to Dakota, and
Bess had taken upon her girlish shoulders the burdens of wifehood and
motherhood almost before her girlhood had reached its first period of
bloom. In addition to the work of being cook and scrub-woman, she was
now a mother and nurse. As I looked around upon her worn chairs, faded
rag carpets, and sagging sofas,--the bare walls of her pitiful little
house seemed a prison. I thought of her as she was in the days of her
radiant girlhood and my throat filled with rebellious pain.

All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities
came back upon me in a flood. Nature was as beautiful as ever. The
soaring sky was filled with shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink's
fairy bells rose from the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous
grass and waving grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset
could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought
out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these
homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily routine of these
lives.

I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw lovely
girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of the women I
had known had withered into querulous and complaining spinsterhood, and
I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of the farm. "Of such pain
and futility are the lives of the average man and woman of both city and
country composed," I acknowledged to myself with savage candor, "Why lie
about it?"

Some of my playmates opened their acrid hearts to me. My presence
stimulated their discontent. I was one of them, one who having escaped